This week I dropped in on an estate agent to test the state of the market. Everyone in the place stopped dead. Beaming smiles spread across faces. Two salesmen leapt to their feet. I appeared to be a member of that dying species: a customer. Seats were thrust at me. Would I like a coffee, a discount, or a driver to my favourite maisonette? I might have been telling the Jehovah's Witnesses that I was really seeking Jesus. Only violins and a celestial choir were missing.

My ongoing search for good news among the ruins is proving ever more fruitful. When I left the estate agent I immediately bought shares in kindness, with a side bet on courtesy and brotherly love.

Last spring, I wondered if the plummeting popularity of Gordon Brown might liberate him to do what he really wanted - such as govern well. The indicators I listed were an end to 42-day detention, early withdrawal from Iraq, cheaper Olympics, curbing the bonus culture, curtailing defence extravagance and cancelling ID cards and the NHS computer database system. If he did these things, his ratings might rise and he would save the exchequer billions.

So it has come to pass. The first four items are already in train and rumour has it that major defence projects are for the chop. School attainment tests are being abolished, beyond my wilder dreams. Only ID cards and NHS computers still limp on, surely not for much longer. The truth is that good government may now burst out all over. The oleaginous super-confidence of New Labour is in the descendant. Spending on ill-considered projects, consultants and gimmicks will end. Taxing will have to join hands with spending. As a result, shares in Gordon Brown have been highly volatile, but they are now outperforming the market. Indeed, in some media markets, they are approaching bubble status.

The same onset of realism is extending to the private sector. Carbon-crazy plans for totemic City skyscrapers modelled on cheese-graters, testicles and mobile phones, are being torn up. I once predicted that Canary Wharf would, like the Empire State Building, end up sheltering charity gift shops and asylum seekers. It may take time to realise, but it will happen.

Overseas I would be surprised if that obscenely speculative bubble, Dubai, which currently hosts a quarter of the world's cranes, does not see total collapse. Like Ozymandias's "vast and trunkless legs of stone", its mile-high towers, palm islands and patio air-conditioners will moulder and decay. The "sneer of cold command" will wither. First overrun by refugees and squatters, Dubai will eventually return to where "boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away".

On the domestic front I would buy shares in home cooking, amateur dramatics and conversation. Teenagers will be civil to their parents. Luxury restaurants are already slashing their lunch prices. Taxis are suddenly available. The Donmar Warehouse company has declared a top price of £29. "Greed is good" bonuses are in freefall, at least until the lax regulation of tax havens contrives to harness them. Dorset partridges are cheering at the storm of abuse that has greeted the shooting holiday of American AIG executives to their corner of the wood.

This may spell trouble for purveyors of shotguns, Porsches, fitted kitchens and second homes in the Cotswolds. But it is leading to a surge in upmarket car-boot sales. One American community has already been forced to limit these to one per household per month.

The market in humility is thus soaring. When Brown was challenged on his pledge to "end boom and bust" he meekly tried a joke, that his promise covered only "an end to Tory boom and bust". The Labour version was clearly alive and kicking.

Dribbling apologies are now emerging from the mouths of bankers and regulators. Chary of being sued, they risk only that they "feel wretched" or "regret certain decisions". Yesterday the head of the Financial Services Authority, Hector Sants, went so far as to confess to "business models ill-equipped to survive the stress ... a fact that we regret". It was like a pilot protesting that his plane was flying just fine except for the engines. Such gestures of remorse may signify little, but they restore some dignity to public life.

As humility shares boom, the concept will reach beyond the rituals of atonement. It will infuse political discourse with caution for years to come. Just as 9/11 traumatised national defence, so the credit crunch has traumatised economic management. Whether, as with 9/11, that management is distorted by the trauma remains to be seen.

Jeremy Bentham, one of the fathers of British political economy, stipulated that "he who has most wealth must be regarded by a legislator as having most happiness. But the same quantity of happiness will not go on increasing in anything near the same proportion as the quantity of wealth."

This disproportionality has been tested to destruction by the recent hysteria of City incomes. The result is that, after a decade of widening wealth differentials, they should start to narrow. Non-economic components of what we vaguely refer to as the good life will take more prominence. The hedge-fund speculator will learn, with Voltaire, that it is best to cultivate one's garden. This will surely be a good thing. Economists will move away from their failed models to study human history and behaviour. Britain might inch up the University of Michigan's world happiness survey from its present miserable ranking of 21st, below Mexico and the US.

We might even see a resurgence of the "happiness" movement of the early 1970s; of Schumacher's "small is beautiful" economic theory. We might find a new appreciation for the king of Bhutan's edict on the importance of "gross national happiness", and for John Ralston Saul's remark that the American mission of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was nothing to do with money. Saul called for a more subtle understanding of contentment, "to escape the 20th-century idea that you should smile because you're at Disneyland".

While it may be too early for a bull market in gaiety, we can surely start investing in sanity and pragmatism. In times of trouble, Britons have always adopted a stance of patience tinged with optimism. As Mrs Micawber said of her husband: "I have known him come home to supper with a flood of tears and a declaration that nothing was now left but a jail; and yet go to bed making a calculation of the expense of putting bow-windows to the house, 'in case anything turns up'."